Samples Of the Week: July 24

A breakdown of the week's hottest tracks by their samples.

When hip-hop began, samples were all that DJs and producers had to construct instrumental tracks with. They'd dig through crates of vinyl trying to find isolated drum breaks, melodies or vocals that they could repurpose for use in hip-hop music. Today, sampling has become less common, but a choice sample can still push a track from lukewarm to hot faster than you can say "uh-huh honey".

This week, see who Drake, Common and Lil Bibby chose to sample in their recent releases, all of which you can find on HNHH. Check back every Thursday for more record breaks from your favorite artists.

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Ok yeah, "0 To 100" came out almost eight weeks ago, but it still seems to be one of the hottest tracks around, and we just located the somewhat odd sample that drives the song. Those eerie opening seconds come from a track called "Vibez" by two guys named Adam Feeney and Chester Stone Hansen, and apparently, that song's from 2014 as well.

On the other hand, the James Blake sample that appears at the track's end is proving more difficult to locate, as it's not taken from any of his commercially released tracks. Odds are that Drizzy secured an exclusive sample from either an upcoming track or an old, unreleased one.

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By this point, everybody knows that Common's incorporating some of Chicago's newest artist on his new album, Nobody's Smiling, but on his latest, he also throws it back to the Chi of old. "The Neighborhood" flips Chicago legend Curtis Mayfield's "The Other Side Of Town" into a poignant track about the modern state of the city.

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'80s rock siren Pat Benatar isn't the most obvious hip-hop sample material, but damn, Lil Bibby proved me wrong by chopping up her song "Love Is A Battlefield" on "We Are Strong," his latest track.